We have exciting news! TRI Pointe Group was honored as 2015 Builder of the Year by Builder Magazine.

In mid-2009, Bauer, Mitchell, and Grubbs -mapped their vision to be a “next generation” home builder—free of legacy land issues, intimate with home buyers’ needs, and an operational outperformer.

In mid-2015, Fortune 1000 sustainable profitability is more like it, based on mapping national, but acting, eating, sleeping, and breathing local. The leaders of TRI Pointe’s confederation “look at their world from a retail perspective,” Bauer says. “What the consumer wants has begun to shift much faster and more dramatically than at other times in home building cycles, so what we learn from each of those leaders every day allows us to change our thought processes and focus on what the consumer’s going to want. With our structure, everybody gets immediate on-the-ground updates and can address and mine that.”

TRI Pointe’s “sharing economy” business model materially impacts its odds at triumph—a house plan product that works effectively in multiple markets; a best practice that can port from one division to another; a marketing or demand-generation technique that flares up and takes hold in a single submarket; a land underwriting process that can scale across the enterprise; a validated safety procedure for jobsites.

High-level and in-the-trenches collaboration is something that has become standard operating procedure at the freshly formed top-20 home building enterprise. Perhaps even more important, it also acquired a brain trust and executional SWAT team of five operating chiefs with 70-plus years of battle testing who represent the promise to replenish the lot pipeline—when the moment is right to do so—for less than $100,000 per lot the next time around.

“When it comes to product design, we’re obsessive when it comes to learning what we should be building based on the local knowledge, the data, and the competition,” Grubbs says. “It may be a manufacturing-based process, but it’s a consumer-centric company.”

A rocket-thrust takeoff gave TRI Pointe a storybook start. From its first incarnation as an Irvine Co. fee-builder in spring 2009, to its initial public offering in January 2013, to its dramatic $2.8 billion coup to acquire the five WRECO home building companies, it has been a hell of a ride, even for a precocious six-year-old.

“This is absolutely the company that we envisioned when we were first talking about what it could be,” says Mitchell, the COO. “The magnitude may be different, but the heartbeat, the passionate culture, the customer focus, and our core thought that we could be different from every company that had come before us was part of the genesis of the idea.”

As we glance, momentarily, back at TRI Pointe’s 2014 triumphs, we see a who-are-these-guys fearless upstart that delivered 144 homes in 2012, and 459 in 2013, emerging victorious from a seven-month high-stakes scrum for the huge WRECO land and talent prize in late 2013.

We see a story that’s as much about trust’s role in big-time outcomes as it is the magic of smart money, and it’s also the story of how scale may play differently in home building than many people think it does.

Check out the entire Builder Magazine article to learn more about the recent triumphs and how trust is what we strive to build every day.